April 15, 2006
I like punishment (so long as it's free)
I recently inherited an Apple Powerbook (G4, 15", 1.5 ghz). It's a little older, but since it seemed comparable to my Gateway (albeit with a better graphics card and better resolution), I thought I'd use the Powerbook and give Alison the Gateway.
My experience begins with installing Mac OS X. It was pretty straightforward. I fill out some information and it begins installing a bunch of packages. Much like Ubuntu, it didn't ask what I wanted to install, it just started installing everything it could. When I say *everything*, I seriously mean everything. I watched this thing install a dozen language fonts for over ten minutes straight. I sure wished it asked me whether I speak Finnish or not before deciding to waste my time and the computer's memory.
After the installation, the computer was reset and I booted into OS X. The first thing that happened was this weird animation that flashed "welcome" in a dozen languages. I'm sure someone out in some stupid world thinks this is welcoming. It was just annoying for me, especially when I realized I couldn't turn it off. I then started the software update manager. While that was running, I decided to IM Alison to pass the time. I looked for the chat program and found iChat. Setting up my account was painless and everything looked quite reasonable at first. Then, I actually started chatting and everything went wrong. First the little text bubbles are just annoying. It wastes screen real estate and trivializes my conversation into some sort of weird Japanese animation watched by 13-year olds. Is this what Apple thinks the default behavior of instant messaging should be?
After updating OS X, I realized I just felt uncomfortable in this Apple universe. The windows behaved funny (the close button on the window menu is on the wrong side), the mouse cursor moved too slow (and I'm too lazy to change the speed), and every time I wanted to Ctrl, I had to use the Apple key. More importantly, I had no idea how to actually *control* the system (for instance, how the hell do you start an ssh server?). As such, I decided it was time to install Linux and KDE. I reboot the machine, popped the Ubuntu Dapper CD in, and began installing. Again, it was straightforward. Ubuntu even installed a boot loader for me so that I can switch between the different systems at boot.
Nearly everything worked in Ubuntu. The wifi driver needed some handling (and still does) and the graphics driver isn't as fast as it should be, but no major hiccups besides that. The only major annoyance is that there are no open source codecs for Apple Quicktime files (the glorious irony) or a good flash player. Normally this isn't a problem for Linux. Linux normally can use the Windows binary codec for Quicktime and Adobe releases a binary for their flash player... of course, since I'm not running an x86, this is a slight problem. Oh well, I've secluded myself into a minority group inside a minority group. Given these pains, I'm still happy I get to use an operating system where all my keyboard shortcuts and command line tricks *just work*.
Posted by jhorey at 03:09 AM | Comments (0)